Laura Mccullough

A Sense of Regard: Essays on Poetry and Race Laura Mccullough

Marc Notes: Includes bibliographical references.; A Sense of Regard, says Laura McCullough, is an effort to collect the voices of living poets and scholars in thoughtful and considered exfoliation of the current confluence of poetry and race, the difficulties, the nuances, the unexamined, the feared, the questions, and the quarrels across aesthetic camps and biases. The contributors discuss issues as various as their own diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds. Their essays, which range in style from the personal and lyrical to the critical, are organized into four broad groupings: Americanism, the experience of unsilencing and crossing borders, interrogating whiteness, and language itself. To read them is to listen in as the contributors speak what they know, discover what they do not, and in the process often find something new in themselves and their topic. As a reader you are invited, says McCullough, to be moved from one sense of regard to another: to be provoked and to linger in that state. To query, quarrel, and consider. A Sense of Regard grew out of a recent gathering of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP), where a poet's comments on the work of another sparked impassioned and contentious conversations in person, in print, and online. Though race is often thought of as an age-old topic in poetry, McCullough saw clearly that there is still much to discuss, study, and tease apart. Moving the conversation beyond the specificity of those initial AWP encounters, with their mostly black/white focus on race, these essays provide a context and a safe starting place for some urgently needed discussions we too rarely have. --; Provided by publisher.; McCullough has collected the voices of living poets and scholars in thoughtful and considered exfoliation of the confluence of poetry and race in our time: the difficulties, the nuances, the unexamined, the feared, the questions, and the quarrels across aesthetic camps and biases. The book brings together essays by a range of writers and academics whose work varies in style from personal accounts and lyrical essays to challenging criticisms. McCullough believes this approach allows for more avenues and angles of exploration on this complex topic. She has also strived to be as inclusive as possible, to reach past the black/white perception of race and offer essays from numerous racial backgrounds. The anthology covers many issues that cross racial and ethnic borders and is divided into sections based on these issues: Americanism, the experience of unsilencing and crossing borders, interrogating whiteness, and language itself--; Provided by publisher. Review Quotes: "Race is an old topic in poetry, but it still urges for in-depth exploration of visible or invisible labels of politics and racialization in America. This book, which gathers a collection of essays from poets and critics of different races, presents multiangle views about race and its relationship with poetry; the combined perspectives in "A Sense of Regard" has the potential to make a more significant contribution to the topic of poetry and race than any single author could accomplish."--Jianqing Zheng, editor of "The Other World of Richard Wright: Perspectives on His Haiku"Review Quotes: "An important book. I am hard pressed to think of many anthologies that take on a cultural scope this wide and varied. Such a book needs to exist in the world, especially since our literary landscape largely lacks this kind of critical engagement with poetry, specifically written by poets rather than 'traditional scholars.'"--Matthew Shenoda, author of "Tahrir Suite"Biographical Note: Laura McCullough is an associate professor of English at Brookdale Community College. Her essays, criticism, poems, creative nonfiction, and short fiction have appeared in a wide range of literary magazines and journals, and her books include the poetry collections "Rigger Death & Hoist Another," "Panic, ""Speech Acts," and "What Men Want." Her hybrid works include" Ripple & Snap" and "Shuttle*Voices*Wind." She is the editor of the anthology "The Room and the World: Essays on the Poet Stephen Dunn." McCullough is also the founding editor of "Mead: The Magazine of Literature and Libations," for which she currently acts as an editor-at-large. Publisher Marketing: A Sense of Regard, says Laura McCullough, is an effort to collect the voices of living poets and scholars in thoughtful and considered exfoliation of the current confluence of poetry and race, the difficulties, the nuances, the unexamined, the feared, the questions, and the quarrels across aesthetic camps and biases. The contributors discuss issues as various as their own diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds. Their essays, which range in style from the personal and lyrical to the critical, are organized into four broad groupings: Americanism, the experience of unsilencing and crossing borders, interrogating whiteness, and language itself. To read them is to listen in as the contributors speak what they know, discover what they do not, and in the process often find something new in themselves and their topic. As a reader you are invited, says McCullough, to be moved from one sense of regard to another: to be provoked and to linger in that state... To query, quarrel, and consider. A Sense of Regard grew out of a recent gathering of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP), where a poet's comments on the work of another sparked impassioned and contentious conversations in person, in print, and online. Though race is often thought of as an age-old topic in poetry, McCullough saw clearly that there is still much to discuss, study, and tease apart. Moving the conversation beyond the specificity of those initial AWP encounters, with their mostly black/white focus on race, these essays provide a context and a safe starting place for some urgently needed discussions we too rarely have.

Contributor Bio:  McCullough, Laura Laura McCullough's second collection of poems, WHAT MEN WANT, is published by XOXOX Press with blurbs by Hilda Raz, Denise Duhamel, and Kurt Brown, and her third, Speech Acts, is forthcoming from Black Lawrence Press. Her first, now out of print, The Dancing Bear, debuted in 06 with jacket blurbs by Stephen Dunn, Li-young Lee, and BJ Ward. In 07, Mudlark published her chapbook of prose poems, Elephant Anger, and she won her second NJ State Arts Council Fellowship, this time in poetry; the first was in prose. She has an MFA in fiction from Goddard College. She's attended, the Catskill Poetry Workshop, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the San Juan Workshops, the Summer Solstice Writers Conference, went to Bread Loaf 2x, once as part of the Social Staff, attended the Colrain Poetry Manuscript Conference and the Vermont Studio Center. Her work has appeared recently or is forthcoming in The American Poetry Review, Prairie Schooner, Spoon River, Guernica, Crab Orchard Review, Tusculum Review, Hanging Loose, Pebble Lake Review, The Hiram Poetry Review, Gargoyle, Iron Horse Quarterly, The Hiss Quarterly, The Pedestal, The Potomac, Nimrod, Boulevard, Tattoo Highway, Gulf Coast, Guernica, Hotel Amerika, Poetry East, The Portland Review, and others. Her book reviews have appeared in such places at Webdelsol Review of Books, The Potomac, and Small Spiral Notebook.